5K Retina iMac VS 6 Core New Mac Pro ~ 4K Video Editing Comparison – Final Cut / Premiere Pro

[Rick Lang]

He was running the entry-level 6-core Mac Pro with D500s I believe, which lists for $4K. My memory (haven’t wanted to sit through the video twice) was 16 GB RAM, 256 GB flash (which he calls SSD, for shame as the PCIe flash is better than the SATA SSD).

I expected the H.264 transcoding on the iMac to beat the 6-core Mac Pro as has been well documented elsewhere due to QuickSync. It was a little surprising to see the iMac beat the entry-level 6-core Mac Pro on most of his ProRes transcodes except when the going got heavier.

I think everyone here has a healthy regard for the amazing 5K Retina iMac considering the Mac Pro screen is arguably non-existent or limited to 4K as an add-on.

A fully tricked out busy 6-core Mac Pro very likely will trump a loaded busy iMac (okay forget about H.264 for a moment) but I think for many the iMac does a great job as we often hear from those using it. I think the differences were minimized as well because he was using FCP X that has been tuned for these machines. It would have been more interesting if he had added DaVinci Resolve in the mix at which point I suspect the loaded 6-core Mac Pro would be pulling away from the iMac. Still I think he did a decent test all in all.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Max Yuryev]

Hey Guys, Sorry if I’m resurrecting an old thread but I just found this and wanted to chime in. My Mac Pro (now sold) was a 6 core with D700 graphics, 256GB PCI-SSD, 16GB ram. When ordering it I knew that the extra GPU power would help so I opted to spend the extra $ and wait time.

This testing really opened my eyes and made me more curious as the iMac seems to be very quick at rendering. I just build a hackintosh using the same CPU as in the iMac (with much better cooling of course) as well as a fairly quick SSD (not a bottleneck) 16GB RAM, and GTX 970 GPU. The 970 GPU should be much more powerful than the M295X (just like the D700’s are) but my results were very similar to the Mac Pro times. I also tested this same build with the 750Ti, 960, and 980 and the render times are almost identical as the 970.

This is because the GPU’s are almost never fully utilized. I also have a R9 285 and 290X to test but unfortunately I can’t get them to boot. I REALLY wish AMD would provide OSX drivers like Nvidia does. The 290X is the most powerful single GPU AMD makes, and the R9 285 is the second newest card after the M295X and the M295X may be based off of the architecture so I was really hoping to try it and see if the results are similar.

It really seems that FCX is taking full advantage of the M295X and is using it much more efficiently that other cards, even though those are more powerful. After doing all this testing there is really no other explanation, as I’m using the same CPU now with Quicksync. It would be amazing to see a M295X or a slightly slower version of it in a new Macbook Pro 15″ (or 17″).

Attached is some info on how the Hackintosh with similar specs but more powerful GPU compares.